


Earthquake

by nimiumcaelo



Series: Flowers Grow Where the Garden Meets the Wood [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Ficlet, POV Mike Wheeler, Poetic elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 08:33:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimiumcaelo/pseuds/nimiumcaelo
Summary: "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. . ."Robert Frost"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. . ."John Muir





	Earthquake

**Author's Note:**

> Just to clarify: this is written from Mike's POV.

He sits beside you and your fingers almost touch his; you are two tectonic plates separated only by the fault line that rides between you like a gash in the seam of the universe.

 

When his eyes turn on you, they search for the four-leaved clover in the field of your freckles. His eyes trace a waterfall down your nose and land in misty clouds that float at the edge of your lips, shimmering with possibility. If you were encased in marble, set up as a sentinel to guard him forever, the ivy would shy away from your face and birds would not deign to perch atop the peaks of your shoulders – they would understand the imperative of your gaze meeting his. He sees in you the wilderness and he is afraid. You represent uncertainty and temptation – dancing naked in the moonlight.

 

If you are the wilderness, he is a garden pruned and teeming with potential and fertile anxiety twitching his fingertips. His breath is against you, at the corner where your neck meets your shoulder; his arms wrap around you, a pair of handles in the swift current of your uprooted life. You cling to him because you need to: you simply cannot exist without his presence here, now. Bees push out against his skin to form the knobs of his spine that run down his back. When you touch them they are firm and they hum to the same consistency that your brain sings, like a tuning fork to a concert piano.

 

You see in him so many colors hitherto unknown; his eyes are both planets and flower petals; his hair traps insects in its ancient amber and is the same soil that grows the trees. When he exhales against you, it is both a solar wind burning you alive and a rabbit’s breath too subtle to detect. If he blinked you might disappear, for you do not exist outside his appraisal.

 

You balance alarm and elation when he turns away from you to the rest of the world that you had forgotten existed. A rock-slide crashes down a mountain when he laughs; you are startled, and turn towards him but he does not look at you. His eyes are instead on the trees at the edge of the yard and you wish to be a dryad, if only to have his attention back. There is a breeze that tousles the hair on the crown of his head like an aspen. Water rushing loudly in your ears, you feel the current of your life pushing against your side and you feel drawn to his anchor. Pushing back against it gives you some faulty sense of your own strength and you realize you have no choice against this dying orbit.

 

Two tectonic plates collide and an earthquake shatters windows in a ten-mile radius.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Feel free to shoot me a suggestion or request if you'd like. :)  
> \- M


End file.
